I'm probably the only one following the "food truck wars" in New York. There's the Game of Thrones foodtruck competing with the Camelot foodtruck... And the public has voted! Not only does the Camelot foodtruck hand out free turkey legs, but it's staffed with wenches in classic Disney princess garb.

I like that Starz is quietly pulling the rug out from under everyone. First Spartacus. and now Camelot -- which is basically Spartacus with Roman-Britons.

I watched the pilot a month or so back (and I think it premieres properly sometime in April). Camelot is kind of feeding off of Game of Thrones uberhype exhaustion, the promise of full frontal orgies, and the inexhaustible mine of Arthurian nonsense.

This will be a dark, dark day for my manhood. The first time I've gone to a gathering for a TV premiere. Even when Doctor Who came back, I watched it on my own like anything else. But now it's food and drink and gather around with people dressed like they're from Westeros.

I don't know why they complain about piracy when they renew these shows before they even air.

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Game of Thrones doesn't debut until Sunday night, but HBO is so confident about the series' success that the network has already told showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss to put on those thinking caps and start coming up with storylines for a possible second season.

Here's the problem -- first, even the die hard fans kind of hate the series after the third book. Second, with just a little bit of scratching on the surface, the truth is that this is a low-rent fantasy series by a hack writer that's unfinished and will probably remain so forever. When you translate that into a screenplay and cast amazing actors to play it, you sort of see all the flaws.

The series is so loyal to the books (with a few weird exceptions) that you almost have to have read the books to follow it properly. However, if you've read the books, then there's zero drama with the series because you know everything that's going to happen.

What did I take away from it? Blonde chick nudity and the Treme season two trailer.

It's the Walking Dead problem. These shows are 99% hype and 1% actual show, and the source material is, frankly, not very good.

And, like Walking Dead, the show gets renewed for multiple seasons before it even airs. It's like the audience isn't required anymore. They make a show, screen it with the press corps (who they buy off with swag and favors) and use them to secure MEGA-ADS! Then, having made their money, they're done. Who cares if anyone watches it.

Oh, but, if you download it you get sued for more money than the show would have made even if it was a success. So, worst case, you recoup your losses by plucking a few IP's out of the air.

My feeling with this and Walking Dead is that the technology has made it so that they can crank this shit out on the cheap, and what's a few Sunday nights matter when you've made megamillions with the exploitation rights? The nerds will buy the overpriced DVD sets, and then the re-release special edition sets, and then the blu-ray extra special edition sets regardless of quality.

So, despite the hype, Game of Thrones opened up to low ratings. And I'm sure it'll lose them as it goes on, because it's a convoluted mess for normal viewers. I sat and watched it with a bunch of feverish fans and they almost needed Cliff Notes to help them figure shit out.

The hype has now shifted to "The next episodes are better than the pilot." Har-har. We've heard that a thousand times.

But, of course, ratings don't matter. As noted in my posts above. I remain convinced that shows aren't made for an audience anymore. Hell, not just shows. Look at Thor and Captain America. Sequels are in the works!

Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin's massive fantasy epic, finally became a television reality last night. Did it please die-hard fans, or disappoint them? Did it engage novices, or mystify them? On this, the morning after, we conscripted Adam Pasick, a Song of Ice and Fire superfan, and Margaret Lyons, a GoT virgin, to discuss the first episode, what worked and what didn't, and if they'll be sticking with the series.

MARGARET LYONS: I'm not much of a fantasy person generally, and while I found the first two installments of Game of Thrones exciting enough, I don't know that I'm going to stick it out. I feel like I've seen all of this before. It's Rome in medieval times; it's The Tudors with less history. Hell, parts of it seem ripped from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The acting is lovely, the costumes are gorgeous, and I have a soft spot for wolf puppies, but lavish production values and bare breasts aren't enough. I want to be totally enthralled by the ambition and scope of the story, but two hours in and Game just seems like Lord of the Rings–lite. What am I missing?

ADAM PASICK: First, a disclaimer. It's hard for me to take an unbiased look at Game of Thrones, the series, because I have been obsessed with the books so long that they're taking up the same amount of mental real estate as some people might devote to, say, Star Wars. But if I'm trying to be objective, I can totally see why the show seems like a recombinant organism made up of bits and pieces of the knights and sword epics that are as old as, well, knights and swords.

Don't get held up on the fact that there have been similarly themed shows that have come before: I love Game of Thrones not because of the genre setting, but almost despite it. This is a big, sweeping epic that will explore some very dark particulars of human nature — and completely mess with your head in the process. I like Lord of the Rings, but George R.R. Martin makes Tolkien look about as morally ambiguous as a nursery rhyme. However, I admit that it's impossible to suss all that out in the first two episodes, which have to spend a lot of time on exposition and character introduction. So it goes for most big, ambitious TV series. Do me a favor, and stick with it: It gets better.

LYONS: I’m glad you brought up moral ambiguity, because it points to one of the things I’m having a little trouble with in the series: It’s pretty light on actual human emotions, and it’s hard to invest in someone’s moral struggle when they only ever seem to play one note. That guy wants vengeance! That woman wants power! He has a secret! It’s telegraphed and belabored, and while there are plenty of incidental behaviors that are reminiscent of real life — say, Arya teasing her older sister — the Really Big Feelings ring incredibly false. It's possible that comes more from the acting than anything else; Maisie Williams is terrific as the younger Stark sister, so I find Arya really compelling, but Emilia Clarke's blank Daenerys just doesn't make sense to me.

Sprawling epics often wind up overexplaining their constructs and underdeveloping the characters’ inner lives (I mean, as long as we’re talking about Star Wars ), and while Games has managed to create action within its exposition, I need some compelling emotions in there, too.

PASICK: Daenarys is a passive, unappealing character at the beginning, but that's by design. She'll have the biggest transformation of any character this season. As for undeveloped inner lives that sounds familiar ah yes, I just wrote about that for Vulture. But I'll summarize: The books are all about sticking the reader inside the heads of a rotating crew of narrators, giving the exact sort of insight that I think you're asking for. I'll admit that it remains to be seen whether the creators can make this work on TV.

Think back to the shows like Lost and The Sopranos that precisely set up their chess pieces at the beginning of a season. The opening moves didn't make much dramatic sense at the beginning, but when the hammer drops at the end, everything falls into place. The seemingly obvious and simplistic motives that seem belabored now will — if the shows pulls off its ambitious agenda — take on a much more layered meaning once the plot takes a few more spins around the map. This also might help: Every character in the Game of Thrones thinks they're the hero of this story, with perfectly good reasons for the occasionally loathsome acts they commit.

LYONS: Where this is differing from the pilots of Lost or The Sopranos for me is that those pilots were more nuanced — the pilot for Lost managed to combine serious action with some shadowy mystery and time-jumping thrown in. The Sopranos pilot punctuates its atmosphere of suburban claustrophobia with moments of acute aggression. Thrones so far is just hitting the same tone over and over, and that tone is "Impending Doom." It's so much doom! Everyone's on edge, and it seems like everyone's working some kind of angle — except for Peter Dinklage's Tyrion, who's probably the best character because he's the only one who seems to be having any fun. Between the beheadings, the rape, the incest, and the generalized sense of anxiety that seems to engulf all members of the Stark family, Tyrion is a welcome bright spot of relief.

Also, if I hate the ending of Game as much as I hate the endings of Lost and The Sopranos, I’m blaming you.

PASICK: With very few exceptions, I love the casting, especially my favorite characters: Jon Snow, Arya Stark, and Tyrion Lannister. Peter Dinklage is predictably awesome. The character of Catelyn Tully is a little more Mama and a little less Grizzly than I would have liked. The Wall, which I think is the single coolest thing that George R.R. Martin imagined for the books, looks appropriately awesome; I can't wait for all the action that's going to unfold there. The blood and guts didn't affect me much, maybe because we don't really know any of the characters who bit it, but I did find the marital rape scene with Khal Drogo and Danerys hard to watch. In the books, he treated her a bit nicer, even if she thought she was essentially his property, so maybe it's a more honest portrayal to show her suffering.

Finally, at the risk of scaring you off, the ending to the books hasn't even been written yet. If it never gets finished, or the ending sucks, I'll be so despondent that your newbie blame will be the least of my problems. Oh, and the Sopranos finale was perfect. Don't stop believin'.

Borrowing a page from The Wonder Boys, Martin has been struggling for six years with this book, and very vocally having an emotional breakdown throughout. The book weighs in at over 1500 pages.

Technically, he started this book in 2000, but he threw it out and wrote a shorter, poorly-received fourth book. So he's actually been working on this for 11 years.

So I guess they can take their time with the TV series, eh? Not even doing a book a season will be slow enough to catch up with the conclusion.

Personally, I feel the lack of a conclusion to the series (something that, like Wheel of Time, may well be permanent), colors the TV show. Also -- Martin, as of the third book, has mired himself in so many intricate sub-plots that most normal people can't continue reading.

I don't see any way the show can continue past this season unless they totally turn away from the source material...

Okay, so episode three has finally won me over. Mainly because we finally have all the cool people on board (and the ones who start out not cool are now becoming cool). It took, like, most of the first book to get to that point!

The cool people all manage to carry the books. I know people who just read the cool character's chapters and skip the rest! And, of course, there was an uproar when a few cool characters were omitted from the last book.

Now we're well on the road to everyone getting fucked up and coming into their roles.